Clicker Heroes | 10 Tips to Progress Faster

Ten habits that make the biggest difference to how fast a Clicker Heroes 1.0e12 save moves. None of them are secrets, but most slow saves are missing at least one. If you are starting from scratch, read the new player guide first — this picks up where it leaves off.

Resets

1. Ascend early and often

A short run that doubles your Hero Souls beats a long run that barely moves them.

Progress comes from resets, not from any single run. Pushing deeper after your gains have stalled is time you could have spent on a faster next run.
Early on, a good rule is to ascend once the run would at least double the Hero Souls you already have.
If the next boss wall would take more than a few minutes of farming, ascending is usually the quicker way past it.
Spend every Hero Soul on ancients straight after ascending, before you start the new run.

2. Transcend on time

Take the first one at zone 300. After that, watch your soul growth.

Transcend as soon as it unlocks at zone 300. Transcendent Power boosts every primal boss after that, so any souls you grind beforehand come back quickly.
Later transcensions are about timing: when each ascension is only adding a small fraction to your Hero Souls, the transcension is played out.
The transcension viewer shows Hero Souls and Ancient Souls per ascension straight from your save, which makes the slowdown easy to spot.
The outsiders calculator estimates the zone and Ancient Souls a transcension should end on, so you know roughly where to stop before you start.

Heroes

3. Push your newest hero

Damage comes from one hero at a time. Make sure it is the right one.

Each new hero is a tier above the last, so your gold almost always does more on the newest hero you can afford than on anyone behind it.
Buy their upgrades as soon as they unlock — they are nearly always the best gold-for-damage buy available.
Past level 200, level in multiples of 25. Most heroes get a damage multiplier every 25 levels, and stopping just short of one wastes gold.
Older heroes stop mattering once they are left behind. Do not spread gold across the whole roster to keep them level.

4. Keep gilds on one hero

Spread gilds do nothing. Stacked on your main hero, they multiply everything.

Every gild adds damage to one hero only. Scattered across several heroes, most of that bonus sits on heroes you are not using.
Move all of your gilds onto the hero carrying your damage, and move them again when a newer hero takes over.
Regilding costs Hero Souls, so only do it when your current hero is clearly falling behind — not on every small change.
The hero gilding chart tells you which hero to gild at your current gold.

Souls and builds

5. Commit to a build

Idle, hybrid or active. Pick the one that matches how you actually play.

Idle suits players who check in a few times a day. Siyalatas and Libertas reward you for leaving the game alone.
Active suits players who sit with the game open. Juggernaut, Fragsworth and Bhaal scale with clicking, and in-game auto-clickers do that clicking for you.
Hybrid splits souls between the two and suits most players once they have a few auto-clickers.
Half an idle build and half an active one is weaker than either done properly. Choose one and spend souls to match it.

6. Let the calculators do the maths

Ancient and outsider levels are formulas. There is no reason to guess them.

Import your save into the ancients calculator after every ascension. It returns optimal ancient levels for your build, and what each level costs.
Run the outsiders calculator at the start of every transcension. Outsiders respec for free, so there is nothing to lose by following it.
When the calculator and your instinct disagree, trust the calculator. Hand-levelled ancients are one of the most common reasons a save feels slow.

Skills and rubies

7. Chain your skills

Skills used together hit much harder than skills used whenever they come off cooldown.

Save your damage skills for boss fights and fire them together, so the short windows overlap.
Energize doubles the next skill you use, and Reload cuts the cooldown of the last one. Both are worth far more paired with another skill than used on their own.
Dark Ritual permanently raises your DPS for the rest of the ascension. The classic Energize, Dark Ritual, Reload chain early in a run pays off for every zone after it.
Use Metal Detector and Golden Clicks together when farming gold for a big level-up.

8. Spend rubies on auto-clickers

Rubies are scarce. Spend them on things that keep working.

Auto-clickers are the best long-term ruby buy. They power active and hybrid builds and Nogardnit on idle.
Timelapse is worth saving for later in the game, when skipping hours of progress covers a lot of zones.
Skip recruiting mercenaries, buying gilds, relics and extra raid fights. They cost a lot and give little back.
The ruby section of the new player guide has the full buy order.

Everything else

9. Use the side systems

Mercenaries, clans and backups each take a minute a day and add up over weeks.

Keep mercenaries questing at all times, and pick ruby quests whenever they are offered. The mercenary viewer shows your roster and their lifetime stats.
Join a clan and fight the daily raid boss. It is free Hero Souls for a few clicks.
Back up your save regularly — export it and keep the string somewhere safe. A lost save is the slowest progress of all.

10. Break through walls

A wall means something needs to change. Waiting rarely fixes it.

Stuck on a boss? Drop back a zone, farm gold, and level your main hero to its next multiple of 25 before trying again.
Save your skills for the boss and fire them all at once rather than on cooldown.
Check your gilds are on the right hero and your ancients match the calculator. A wall that appears suddenly is often one of those two.
Once Kumawakamaru and Borb start thinning out monster counts, the instakill calculator shows how fast you should be moving through zones.
If none of that works, the run is probably over. Ascend and come back stronger.